


Let's Fell Our Withering Tree

by ishie



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: 10000-30000 words, 2010, Apocalypse, Community: Apocabigbang, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-23
Updated: 2010-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:42:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the end of the world, and Sheldon always has a plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "How's Forever Been Baby" by Elvis Perkins in Dearland; HUGE THANKS to my betas: Inkdot and The_Wanlorn; and to Allthingsholy for an unexpected gift.

_Remember take me back to our teens  
We can waste the time between between between  
Carry me a candle and a lunar calendar  
Will you stay the night with me?  
How's forever been baby?_

In a low, squat building surrounded by trees on three sides and an unassuming gravel lot on the fourth, the steady low-level buzz from the mainframe thrummed under the usual noise of the researchers busy at their individual stations. Glass floor-to-ceiling dividers muffled most of the chatter in the labs on the third floor, but the occasional burst of swearing or laughter always found a way to echo around the room.

In the largest of the labs, on the wall farthest from the door, plasma screens were assembled to form a single monitor. On each side, space was set aside for long chains of computations and observational data that scrolled across the screens while the equipment was in use. In the center, the image of a wireframe model expanded and contracted on the main monitor. It rotated and zoomed in and out, spidery-thin strands of purple and red wrapping around the central structure. The wireframe stabilized, numbers running up and down the sides of the screen and scrolling over every other display in the lab.

Dr Hamid Dariush scratched his beard as he watched. They had only just finished making adjustments to the program that morning. This would be their first attempt at coalescing the matrices since the latest rounds of funding had been secured - funding that had literally made today's run possible with an astronomical sum of money earmarked for expanding the team to its present size.

Pleased with the initial results, Hamid turned away to scrawl his initials across the papers his assistant held out for him. He gave the woman a smile, deep creases bracketing his eyes and mouth.

"Very good, Genevieve," he murmured in Afrikaans. "When this iteration has finished, please have everyone reset for another run."

Despite the team's predilection for speaking French in the lab, Hamid preferred to use their native languages during individual conversations. It was an idiosyncrasy he was glad his team indulged; he'd improved his fluency a hundredfold in more than a dozen languages during his long career.

"Excuse me, Dr Dariush!"

Genevieve rolled her eyes and scurried away, calling out minor corrections to the researchers stationed around the room. Hamid chose to watch her go rather than turn back to the unwelcome video conference and its sole participant - one of the less savory conditions of an otherwise superb grant from the Americans.

"_Excuse_ me!"

With a sigh, Hamid turned back to his laptop and rubbed the vein that had suddenly started throbbing at his temple. "Yes, what is it, Doctor? As you can see, I have rather a lot to get on with today."

"You've made an error—"

Before the person on the far site could finish his sentence, a klaxon sounded overhead, echoing off the thick outer walls of the laboratory. Hamid whipped his chair around to see what had happened.

Genevieve and Tomasz were scrambling to reach the control board, elbowing colleagues and equipment out of their way in their haste. Genevieve reached it first. Her hands flew across the board, typing in the access codes that would allow her to shut down the apparatus cycling many floors below them. The monitor nearest to the board showed similar scenes at their sister facilities. Tomasz shuffled to one side to peer over Genevieve's shoulder and inadvertently switched off the set.

Everyone in the room held their breath as she keyed in the final digits. Hamid was frozen to his seat, fingernails diging into his thighs hard enough to bruise.

Genevieve slammed the heel of her hand down on the input button. The readouts around the room continued to fluctuate rapidly, numbers spinning into ranges they had never seen before. On the central monitor, the wireframe model expanded to immense proportions. The red and purple threads bloated out to add new distorted dimensions to the figure, giving it a lumpy appearance before the expansion stopped and the model started to collapse in on itself.

Hamid stood and scrambled up onto the nearest chair on knees that protested every movement, throwing his arms into the air and raising his voice. "Partez-vous maintenant!" he shouted. "Allez-y!"

His shouts had the opposite effect he intended. Instead of rushing for the exits as they had been trained to do, nearly the entire team had hunkered down over their terminals. Their hands flew across keyboards as they tried to keep up with the data streaming into the central computer. On any other day, he might have been proud of their dedication.

"Ecoutez-moi?" Hamid slid down off the seat and turned in a circle in the middle of the room, hands held out to his sides. He tried again, in German, then Italian. English, Spanish, his native Persian. Nothing made the slightest bit of difference. He might have been whispering — in gibberish, even — for all the notice his team gave.

At the control board, Genevieve was still slamming her hand down on the console, over and over again. Flecks of blood dotted its surface as she battered against it. She shouted in French, Italian, her face tomato-red and gleaming with sweat as she raged. Tomasz caught her elbow and hip-checked her out of the way so that he could repeat her actions, as though hoping she had somehow merely keyed in the wrong sequence. As though everything had not gone horribly wrong.

Above their heads, the model continued to shrink until it finally collapsed and winked out of existence. Tomasz sagged against the control board. Genevieve pounded her hands on his shoulders, shouting with excitement and joy, leaving bloodied palmprints on the pale blue fabric of his lab coat. The klaxon cut out and all around the room people were throwing their arms around each other in relief.

Hamid stepped back to his laptop, ignoring the hubbub around him as easily as it had ignored him. He leaned forward and spoke into the tiny microphone, making sure to look directly into the pinhole camera at the top of the monitor frame.

His voice was thin and high, like he'd been pinched and stretched to twice his usual length. The microphone was barely able to boost his voice above the shouting behind him and his individual words were lost in the cacophony.

In Pasadena, Sheldon Cooper looked up from his own laptop and met Penny's eyes as the picture quality started to degrade. "I tried to tell him he'd made a miscalculation."

"What just happened? Is he okay?" She leaned in over his shoulder. "What's he saying?"

Hamid shouted something incoherent, possibly not even in English nor any other language Sheldon recognized. His image pixelated and broke apart, bands of green replacing a third of the screen before it cut out entirely.

Sheldon tried to reconnect but the system on the far end wasn't responding. Either the network had been brought down or Hamid had deliberately severed the connection. Based on their interactions to that point, Sheldon couldn't be entirely sure it wasn't the latter. Penny hovered behind him while his hands flew across his keyboard, trying to bring up the streaming data feed that he'd been watching during the simulation.

Nothing. There were some older files in the folder where he'd been storing his work to that point, but nothing from the previous week. The only recent file showing on the network was the one he currently had open. He started the auto redialer program to continue trying to connect to Geneva and went back to studying the equations he'd been red-flagging for Hamid's review.

"Ow!" He rubbed at the skin of his neck where Penny had pinched him. "What was that for?"

"Jesus, Sheldon, what do you think? What the hell is going on? Are they okay?"

"The only thing danger they face is the extent of their ignorance. They'll be fine as long as..." He did a double-take and glared at her. "What are you doing in here? How many times have I told you my room is off-limits?"

"Hey, you leave your door wide open, you're gonna have to deal with company. You're just lucky it was me and not somebody trying to steal your TV again."

"Lucky's not the word I would use," he muttered to his laptop as she left.

"I heard that!" she called from the hallway.

Sheldon worked late into the night, meticulously combing through each line of the data he still had stored on his computer. The Skype auto redialer cut out after several hundred attempts and he didn't bother to restart it.

He found another half-dozen errors just by searching for improperly parameterized rational curves and closed his laptop in disgust. It was no wonder his own research had been stalled for months while he waited on interminable grant reviews — if this were the kind of sloppy research that was rewarded, well then! Maybe he wanted no part of it.

He chuckled. As if he would willingly deprive anyone of his contributions.

His bedroom was starting to get chilly, so he rushed through changing into his pajamas and belted his robe firmly. The hallway was dark — in violation of a significant number of safety guidelines — but he didn't bother to catalogue them. Penny had probably flipped the lights off on her way out of the apartment earlier as some kind of ill-conceived prank.

Well, the joke was on her, if that was the case. Sheldon pulled a slim flashlight out of his robe pocket and made his way through the living room to the front door. It wasn't until he reached out to engage the deadbolt that he realized there was no ribbon of light under the door. Nothing glowing through the peephole.

In a panic, he whirled to face the window in the kitchenette but the flashlight's beam bounced off the whiteboard blocking it. He ran for the window over the radiator, and heaved a sigh of relief. It looked as though the power was out all over the city, not just in his building, which all but eliminated the likelihood that an advanced cyborg team from the future was coming to neutralize him.

Just in case, though, he switched off the flashlight and made his way back down the hallway as quietly as he could. If he slept next to his bed instead of in it, that might give him enough time to get away if something did crash into his room in the middle of the night.

Leonard's bedroom door was ajar when Sheldon woke the next morning. After a moment of panic, he realized that it was because his roommate had been working overnight on campus again and not a case of mistaken identity and time-traveling death squads.

Sheldon helped himself to his customary two slices of whole-wheat toast and a soft-boiled egg, then sat on the couch to see which episodes of _Scrubs_ had taped overnight.

Except there was no TV. Nor was there a DirecTV receiver, but in the absence of the television that was of much less importance. There wasn't even a space on the low stand for a television, just a cube of what looked like black plastic. A knob of silvered glass protruded from the top. If it had been hot pink and white instead of unrelieved black, it would have been almost a perfect match for a keepsake box his mother had kept on her dresser when he was a child.

The cube didn't have any power indicators or electrical cords, but on a hunch, he put his plate down on the coffee table and picked up the remote. When he pressed the on button, the cube buzzed. A beam of light shot out of the glass knob. It separated into a dozen multi-colored strands of light that danced around each other with a loud chiming noise, then coalesced into a glowing figure that spread its hands and smiled at him.

"You have no new recordings," it said. "There appears to be an interruption of the broadcast network. Please try again."

The figure collapsed into nothing when Sheldon stabbed the off button. He ran for his room and tried to power up his laptop, but it wouldn't turn on. He unplugged the power cord, waited, plugged it back in and tried again, moved to another outlet, tried to boot on battery power. Nothing. He even tried his mother's favorite and altogether useless trick for any malfunctioning device: shake it, grit your teeth, and call it a tool of Satan.

It wasn't until he was standing in the middle of the room trying to remember if his spare battery was in the apartment or on campus that he noticed his alarm clock was dark. So was the overhead light when he tried to switch it on. And the hallway light, the bathroom light, the light in Leonard's room... Which was clearly _not_ Leonard's room judging by the sports memorabilia scattered across every available surface.

With shaking hands, Sheldon pulled the door closed and went back to his own bedroom. He dressed quickly, pulling on his sturdiest pair of trousers and two shirts plucked from his closet at random. Seconds later, he was searching through the messenger bag hanging on the back of the door for a cellphone. He found it at the bottom of the main compartment, a heavy brick-like mass of dull off-white plastic with a simple two line digital display.

"Well, that's just ridiculous," he complained, thinking of the sleek cube in the next room.

With no phonebook to scroll through, he dialed Leonard's number from memory. It rang twenty-four times before he gave up and tried Raj's cell, then Penny's and Howard's mobile and home numbers. Then the department office on campus. Then all of his friends again, followed by his mother, brother, sister and Meemaw. Then time and weather, which was the only call to go through. It gave him an automated message that trailed off into a squeal of electronic noise before its initial greeting had finished.

Sheldon flipped the call switch to off and then back to on so he could dial again, still marveling at the relatively primitive interface and design.

When he tried 911, the same thing happened again: an automated message cut off by what sounded like old-fashioned modem tones, only this time he managed to catch more than half of a word.

The phone dropped out of his hand and bounced on the bed. He ran for the hallway, then skipped his usual ritual to gain entrance and let himself into Penny's apartment with his spare key. If she didn't see how this qualified as an emergency, then there was simply no hope for her.

She was sitting at her table, squinting sleepily at him, a box of sugared cereal in one hand. He released a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding and temporarily let his shoulders sag in relief.

"Penny, why haven't you answered your phones?"

"You didn't knock," she said, sounding confused, hardly surprising given his entrance and the early hour. After a moment she seemed to process his words and shook her head. "I just got up, like two minutes ago. Why were you calling me from across the hall? I didn't even hear anything ring."

He controlled the urge to recite the number of times he'd dialed both her cell phone and her landline and made an effort to wipe the no doubt panicked expression from his face. She could be stubborn and intractable to the point of madness whenever it was least convenient, and this was certainly the least convenient situation in which he'd ever found himself. He decided that if time permitted, he would do his best to explain the situation but his first priority was getting her up and moving.

"We need to enact Evacuation Plan Gamma immediately. We have a window of only thirty-seven minutes to complete phase one," he cautioned as he headed for her bedroom. He wasn't sure it would be there, but a moment later he pulled the emergency duffel bag out of her closet. He unzipped the main compartment and did a quick visual inventory; it looked as though most of what he'd originally packed for her was still there. The rations would no doubt need to be restocked given her predilection for postponing grocery shopping far beyond any reasonable timeframe. He doubted that there was a version of Penny in any possible universe who had any regard for expiration dates.

When he came back into the living room, he did a double-take to find her in the same position at the table, pouring milk over her cereal. "Why are you still sitting there?"

Of course, the strict schedule of this particular evacuation plan was entirely arbitrary. He'd found that it was easier to encourage people to do what they were required to do when there was a time limit.

"What? I'm eating my breakfast!" She waved the spoon over the bowl, as if he had somehow missed its existence.

Case in point.

It appeared that perhaps some explanations would be necessary after all. He quickly formulated and discarded a number of speeches appropriate for the situation (she'd sung the praises of _2012_, hadn't she?) and settled for saying: "A calamity of epic proportions is about to be unleashed, Penny! We need to be on our way in less than," he made a show of checking his watch, "thirty-four point four minutes."

"Oh, my God, give me five seconds, will you?" she muttered around a mouthful of cereal. She frowned down at the bowl then squinted at the carton next to it. "Ugh, this milk tastes awful. My fridge blows."

Clearly she wasn't listening to him, not in any sense of understanding the meaning of his words. He reconsidered the time of day and her state of dishabille. Thin beams of early morning sunlight streamed in through the windows behind her, highlighting the Cornhusker-red tank top stretched tight over her chest, riding up to reveal several inches of tanned skin above the waistband of her blue and yellow flowered shorts. Her bright blonde hair, still in a wild tangle around her face, fluttered in a barely perceptible breeze from the open window. He shuddered at a sudden vision of it coated with a thick layer of ash and still-burning embers, her skin chalky and grey.

She blinked at him, her expression sleep-dull and serene despite her irritated outburst, and the vision shattered into several thousand pieces.

He shouldered the duffel bag and straightened his shoulders, pulling himself up to his full height and taking a deep breath to expand his chest and diaphragm. "Penny," he said in a voice he'd learned from his father but perfected based on his mother's most authoritarian tone, one that would brook no nonsense or backtalk. "You must come with me if you want to live."

"Seriously? You're giving me Terminator?"

Her quick recognition of the quote startled him and he bit back the retort that it was more relevant than she knew. She seemed more amused than annoyed and he thanked his lucky stars (α and β Geminorum: more commonly known as Castor and Pollux, the celestial twins, though he didn't technically believe in anything as juvenile as luck or Missy's romanticized ideas about shared genetic material).

Within moments, he was able to get Penny on her feet and moving across the hall to the relative, for now, safety of his apartment.

"Sheldon, we've done the fire drill for this like seven times," she whined as he transferred the duffel to her and started rummaging through his desk drawer for the spare flashlight and solar-powered battery charging station.

"First of all, this is not a fire drill. It is an emergency preparedness plan. And second, no, we haven't. This is Plan Gamma. We've only rehearsed this once, and you fell asleep before we reached phase two, necessitating an abort and reschedule. Which never happened, I might add."

"Which is the one we did seven times, then?"

Her voice was marginally more alert than it had been but he was alarmed by how she had not yet picked up on the urgency of the situation. He reevaluated his body language. Perhaps he had been too hasty to present her with a calm and rational demeanor? He had been admittedly lax in his preparations for moments such as these, and he relied perhaps too heavily on depictions of emergency situations in popular media rather than on any real-world application. Cradling the flashlight and charger to his chest, he stepped quickly to her side.

She turned her face up to him, a wrinkle creasing her brow as she laboriously sorted through her often faulty memory for details. "Is Gamma the one where we have to eat squirrels in case the food supply chains are cut off?"

"No, that's Beta."

"Good, I always hated the taste of squirrel."

"It's not so bad when cooked properly. When I'm forced to eat it, I prefer it prepared according to traditional methods such as roasting over a campfire and served with native fauna." He shook his head. As usual, he was allowing her to distract him from the purpose at hand. He checked his watch again. They had less than twenty-nine minutes to finish collecting their belongings and move to phase two, according to the timetable he'd invented, but he would prefer to be out of the building as soon as was possible.

Sooner, if he could find a way to bend time within the next ten minutes.

He unzipped the bag hanging from her shoulder and tucked the flashlight and charger inside. "Will you please pack what you can from the emergency stores in the kitchen?"

"Sure," she said brightly. "But only 'cause you said please."

As she bounded over to the kitchenette, duffel bouncing against her hip, he shook himself. _Would that it were always so easy!_ he thought as he went to his room to collect what he could from his own emergency kits.

Penny opened up a few cabinets and fumbled some cans around until Sheldon disappeared down the hallway. With a groan, she got to her feet and slipped out the door, crossing quickly to her own apartment. Inside, she tried to remember where she'd left her running shoes, couldn't find any clean socks, and jammed on a pair of flip-flops with straps so tight they almost cut off her circulation.

"Freaking ridiculous," she muttered as she caught a glimpse of the street outside. There wasn't even any morning traffic yet.

A quick burrow through her laundry basket turned up a cute hoodie that almost matched her shorts and she pulled it on, suddenly realizing as she did that she hadn't yet put on a bra.

Penny froze, listening hard for Sheldon's footsteps and praying that he was still pulling things out of his room. Why he was in such an all-fired hurry, she didn't know nor did she really care. She just wanted to get this all over with as quickly as possible so she could get to work on time.

She grabbed the nearest purse that didn't make her want to throw up when she looked at it. One of these days she was going to go through all her stuff and throw out the ugly crap she didn't remember buying. There was a pile of crumpled bills on top of her dresser, mixed in with some pocket change, mints, and ballpoint pens from her apron. She scooped it all up and dumped it in the bag, then dropped it on the bed next to yet another pile of clothes. At some point, she assured herself, she'd get her laundry under control once and for all.

There was still no noise from the hallway, meaning Sheldon hadn't yet noticed that she'd escaped, so she darted into the bathroom to brush her teeth. The pipes clanked when she turned the handle but nothing came out, not even the familiar, fast-dying trickle after she forgot to pay her water bill.

"Are you friggin—" Penny dropped her toothbrush in the sink and stomped back into her room. She crunched through a couple of starlight mints while she whipped off her hoodie and tank top. She had just picked up a cute polka-dotted bra when her door slammed back against the wall.

"Eyes closed!" she shrieked, covering her chest with her hands as she did. Sheldon may have gotten a handful the last time, but that didn't mean she had to give him a show whenever he wandered past.

He ignored her, barely sparing her a glance as he scooped up a pile of clothes and her purse off the bed. Penny scrambled to fasten the bra and pull her shirts back on; she'd stuck an arm into one of the hoodie's sleeves and was trying to grab the other behind her back when Sheldon grabbed her by the elbow and started marching toward the door.

She protested the whole way out of her apartment, but shut up when they hit the hallway - he'd left both of the emergency duffels and a case of water bottles on the floor outside her door. Without saying a word, he slung the strap of one of the bags across his chest and stuffed her clothes into it. The ugly purse swayed against his hip. He looked down at the case of water. When she didn't move to help, he cleared his throat and looked pointedly at the bottles.

Penny crossed her arms. "I'm not carrying that."

"I don't have the proper equipment to lift—"

"Oh, my God, just pick it up! It's not going to kill you. I've seen you carry a life-size Yoda heavier than that, so don't even."

Sheldon weighed the likelihood that he could wear her down against the danger that increased exponentially every minute they lingered.

He picked up the water. "Do you think we could get going before—"

Penny rolled her eyes when he cut himself off. "What, before you get a hernia? Slip a disk?" She picked up the remaining duffel and stomped toward the stairs. "Let's go already!"

"Sure, _now_ she's in a hurry," Sheldon muttered.

When Penny pushed through the glass doors in the lobby, the sunlight was crippling. She squeezed her eyes closed and flailed out a hand until it smacked against Sheldon.

"I forgot my sunglasses," she groaned, cracking open an eyelid enough to glare at him. "Either turn off the sun or just let me hang on to you until we get to the car."

It was awkward with all the bags they had hanging between them but they managed to get to the curb without the sun burning out her eyes or Sheldon breaking an arm. She rooted through the purse dangling from the crook of his elbow until she found her keys. Unfortunately, it was one of her backup sets and not the regular keychain with the remote control. The locks made a dull thump as they disengaged. Sheldon wrenched the rear passenger door open while Penny settled behind the steering wheel and whispered her customary pep talk as she tried to coax the engine to life.

As she rooted around in her glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses, Sheldon started slinging bags into the backseat without a single protest about his imaginary sciatica.

"Maybe you should attempt to curtail your alcohol consumption."

Penny gave a whoop of triumph as her hand closed around what felt like cool plastic lenses. But when she pulled the glasses out of the glove box, they weren't a pair she recognized. Since when did she buy aviators? With a shrug, she slid them on. The silvered plastic didn't do much to block the light but it did enough that she could squint instead of walking around like some kind of mole creature.

Sheldon was still lecturing as he slid into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed behind him. "Alcohol acts as a depressant, you know."

"So do you."

"It may also be the cause of your occasional bouts of seborrhoeic dermatitis."

"I don't even know what that is, and I didn't drink last night. I just ... I feel weird. My head is killing me. Can we not talk for a little while? What time is it?"

"Either I can not talk or I can answer your question."

"Just, please, can you shut up, Sheldon?"

Even as nearly blind as she was, Penny didn't miss the way his hands jerked away from the seatbelt buckle when she asked that. She squinted at the dashboard but the light was too bright to read the display on the clock radio. It was too bright to even see where the clock was supposed to be. All she could make out was the vague impression of plastic under the sunlight streaming in through the windows and washing everything out.

Penny thought about telling Sheldon his crazy road trip practice would have to wait until she could actually see where they were going.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked, then motioned at the road stretching out ahead of the car. "Let's go."

She still wasn't an expert on Sheldon — who could be, really? — but she knew that voice. That was his barely-holding-on-to-sanity voice. She threw the car into drive and slowly pulled out of her parking space. With any luck, she thought, her eyes would adjust before she hit anything too important.

Twenty minutes later, she would have given anything to be as blind as the proverbial bat.

She stood on the hood of her car and shaded her eyes with her hands as if that would erase any of what she saw. Sheldon, standing next to the front left tire, made a noise in the back of his throat and sagged against the car.

They were stopped on the Fair Oaks overpass, looking down at the nightmare that was the 210. A sea of cars stretched as far as she could see, every lane clogged with the abandoned, stalled, dead hulks. Here and there she could see accidents, everything from minor fender-benders to a seven-car pileup around a jackknifed semi. But more terrifying than all of that was the utter stillness of the scene. There was nothing inside the nearest cars. They were just empty, like a ghost town of a car dealership had spontaneously grown up around the normal rush hour traffic.

Doors hung open on every vehicle, as if the drivers and passengers had simply decided they'd had enough and walked away.

Penny let her hands fall to her sides and tilted her head back sharply. Tears and terror were clawing their way out of her chest and into her mouth and eyes. She cleared her throat. Tried to keep the panic out of her voice but it still came out too loud and sharp in the now eerie quiet. "Where are we, Sheldon? What the fuck is happening?"

He didn't say anything for a long time. When he finally did, she wished he'd kept his mouth shut instead.

"I think we're in a parallel reality."

She waited for the punchline but his expression stayed still, a mix of fear and excitement that she didn't quite understand. Penny couldn't help it; she started laughing, and once it started, she couldn't stop. She sat down hard on the hood of the car and wrapped her arms around her aching stomach. The laughter was high-pitched and fierce, explosive _ha-ha-ha_s that felt like they would burst her lungs.

Sheldon waited until her laughter turned into wheezing before he tried again. "The project I was working on last night... Dr Dariush and his team have been attempting to create an artificial quantum filament."

He pushed away from the car and paced to the side of the overpass. Penny wiped her eyes and slid off the hood to follow. The bars of the pedestrian barrier were cold against her fingers as they stood side-by-side. She didn't trust her voice not to break, so she swallowed her questions.

"It would take too long to explain what that is or what they were trying to do," he said, for once without his usual condescension. "When the simulation failed last night, I assumed it was just that - a simulation. It's nothing they hadn't done a dozen times already before they brought me in, although the failures aren't usually so dramatic. I _assumed_ someone had enacted one of the catastrophe scenarios as a training exercise."

While he talked, Penny kept scanning the cars below, thinking she saw flickers of movement on the edges of her vision. But when she turned to look there was never anything there. "So, it wasn't a training thing? Are you sure?"

"The external quantum efficiencies in the intermix were all wrong for the scenarios they've been—" He caught her look and shook his head as if to reset his words. "Yes, I'm sure. And I haven't had any response from Geneva, or from any of the other facilities that were taking part. It's like they've all disappeared."

Penny let go of the barrier and grabbed his arm, ignoring his yelp of pain. She dug her fingers in. "What do you mean, disappeared? What does any of that have to do with this?"

She flung an arm out and knocked into the bars. "What the hell is all of this, Sheldon?"

His Adam's apple bobbed, and he lifted his free hand and sort of fluttered it weakly at his side. His mouth twitched, just for an instant, and then he said, "I think they did manage to create an artificial quantum filament. I think it brought us here."

They'd been driving for almost an hour through the Angeles forest. The surface roads through Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge had been mostly clear with only a few intersections clogged with abandoned vehicles. Once they entered the forest itself, there had been a handful of cars pulled over to the side of the road - all with their doors still hanging open and no people to be found. Sheldon insisted they stop to look at each and every one, and to help themselves to whatever supplies they could find inside.

The latest was a Ford Explorer with the leather Eddie Bauer-styled interior that Penny had drooled over since high school. While Sheldon wedged himself under the dashboard and tried to unscrew the CB mount, Penny popped the rear door. Whoever had owned the vehicle had apparently been almost as meticulous as Sheldon; the cargo area was completely packed with sealed plastic totes and coolers. They still hadn't figured out how much time had passed here - how long it had been since the people apparently disappeared into thin air - but from the looks of things in a couple of the vehicles they'd already checked, it had been long enough for food to spoil.

Penny heaved the coolers down to the ground and dragged them off into the shoulder to kick them open. She wrapped the flannel shirt she'd scavenged from the first car around her nose and mouth and leaned down to see what, if anything, was salvageable.

"Sheldon. Sheldon, _come here_."

The truck rocked as his feet kicked. He clambered out from under the dash, rubbing his head and looking around as though something were about to burst from the trees.

"What is it? It's not a bear, is it?"

"It's better than a bear! Come and look at this." She dropped to her knees in the dirt and started pawing through the first cooler she'd opened.

Sheldon shuffled over to her side, still clutching the screwdriver like a weapon and scanning the trees. "Of course it's better than a bear. It's hard to think of anything at this moment that wouldn't be better than a- Oh, my."

Penny grinned at the handgun then up at him. "I know, right? There's like six or seven of them in here, plus ammo. And that thing was just as heavy as this one."

She set the gun back where she'd found it and moved over the other cooler. Sheldon came up behind her and slipped the screwdriver into his pants pocket.

"Is it all handguns? I wouldn't say no to a pump-action shotgun or rifle."

"Uh, there's a couple of boxes of shells in here. Check the back of the truck - maybe there's a shotgun in one of the other boxes." He got a few steps away from her before his words registered. "Wait, did you say you _want_ one? Since when do you like guns?"

"I never said I didn't like them."

"Yeah, but—"

"Penny, we're trapped on an alternate Earth about which we know absolutely nothing. Would you rather we wander around unarmed and totally defenseless?" He didn't wait for her to answer. "Of course you wouldn't; you're not completely without sense."

"Gee, thanks," she muttered to his back as he started pulling boxes out of the cargo area and stacking them on the road.

By the time they'd opened and sorted through everything, they'd found another half-dozen handguns, five shotguns, a rifle with a long-range scope, and an assortment of long-handled hunting knives. Penny had also unearthed a cache of military MREs and dried fruits and jerky from a storage compartment under the middle seats. The sun was high overhead, and Sheldon had the sleeves of his undershirt pushed up to his elbows.

"I've sorted everything according to priority. These near the truck would be of less use to us than these—"

Penny pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. "What are you talking about?"

He gave her a strange look and repeated, "I've sorted everything according to priority."

"You mean like what to take and what to leave?"

"How is this in any way a difficult concept?" he shot back.

She wiped her hands on the thighs of the jeans she'd changed into once they'd crossed into the forest. "Why don't we just take this thing? I mean, we've only got a couple of bags and I'd hate to leave anything behind because it doesn't fit in my car."

Sheldon didn't say anything, just pressed his lips together and stared.

"What now?"

He ducked down to pick up one of the boxes and heaved it back into the Explorer. "I didn't think of that," he said, his posture stiff and embarrassed.

She pretended not to notice that he was upset by it and tried to turn it into a joke. "Hey, I'm always looking for a way to trade up. Did I ever tell you what I did when my sister tried to give me her old car?"

It took them almost half an hour to pack everything in the truck to Sheldon's satisfaction. By the time they were done, he seemed to be back to normal. Maybe a little on the rude side when he told her just how much he didn't want to hear anything else about her family.

Penny got a good laugh out of the look on his face when she offered to let him drive first, though. She grabbed as many CDs as she could carry out of her car and dumped them in the open console between the front seats. "So, which way? I think there's some cabins or something up here if we need to hide out for a few days."

Sheldon was bent over the hood of the truck, tracing lines on a map in the atlas they'd found in the second or third car. "No, we need to go to Michigan," he said, almost to himself.

"Michigan? What the hell is in Michigan?"

"The secret facility I told you about."

The secret— _What_ secret facility?

Her confusion must have been written all over her face because he glanced at her and sighed as he started to fold up the atlas. "Traverse City, Michigan. The secret facility at which I was interviewed for a position that I had to decline—"

"Oh, right, yeah, the lying thing." She rubbed her forehead. Her eyes had finally adjusted to the light but it was still way too bright, even with sunglasses. That plus Sheldon plus being scared half out of her mind and pretending not to be was starting to give her a hell of a headache. "Okay, sweetie, don't take this the wrong way but are you crazy? No, I know, I know; your mom had you tested. Are you _stupid_?"

He pulled himself up to his full height and swept the atlas off the hood of the truck. "I'm never stupid. I may act in what appears to be a hasty or ill-considered fashion at ti—"

She poked him in the chest, hard enough to hurt her own finger. "Leaving town before we knew what was going on was _stupid_. Driving halfway across the goddamn country is _stupid_. How do you even know this doohickey in Michigan is going to work?"

Sheldon looked away, over the hood of the truck and up the road where it snaked off into the trees. He rubbed the spot where she'd poked him and Penny wondered idly if he'd bruise from it.

"I don't," he said, so quietly that she would have missed it if the world weren't so terrifyingly still.

"Don't you want to see some other people? Maybe have a conversation? Look at a new face for a few minutes?"

They were making good time across the desert but having to avoid the highways meant that what was normally a four hour trip was going to take them the entire day. Sheldon sat in the passenger seat with a road atlas unfolded across his lap. He'd traced as many possible routes to Traverse City as he could find that would keep them away from the roads with the heaviest traffic. Neither of them wanted to get stuck on the edge of something like they'd seen back in Pasadena.

After the tenth small town they'd blown through, she was starting to feel the itch of being trapped in the truck with him. She pointed at the sign they were approaching: Pahrump Diner, next left. "Look, a diner! I'm starving; aren't you hungry? Maybe we should pull over for a few minutes. I'm tired of this dried fruit crap and there's bound to be somebody—"

"Good Lord, no! Strangers equal danger, Penny."

"What, are we in kindergarten? Whatever the hell is going on here, there's bound to be people somewhere. And not everybody's going to be evil!"

"And how do you propose we make that distinction? We don't even know how this world _is_ different from our own. Something as simple as a cold could be enough to kill us, not to mention that the whole of society appears to have broken down."

She scoffed. "You don't know that. Maybe, maybe something happened in Los Angeles, like an earthquake or something. Maybe they evacuated the cities and that's why there aren't any people."

"Then why aren't there any emergency broadcasts? We haven't seen any military or police checkpoints, not even abandoned ones." He poked his cell phone, plugged in to recharge and resting in the cup holder Penny hadn't claimed with her bottle of water. "There doesn't even seem to be a cellular network outside of the cities. This has been out of service since we left the apartments and I haven't seen a single cell tower."

He turned to face her, dropping the atlas to the floor. "Penny, you have to face the fact that we might as well be on a different planet. This isn't home. It just looks like it is."

Her head was starting to pound. She curled her hands around the steering wheel and kept her eyes straight ahead rather than look at him. "Yeah, but... The cars are the same, the clothes, the food. Well, okay, except for that milk this morning. But I even recognize the guns! I mean, come on, we haven't seen one damn weird thing since we left LA!"

"Pull over."

"What?" Startled, she glanced over. His face was set in hard lines, like when she'd taken all the washers and dryers on Laundry Night. "Why? You just said—"

"Stop the car!"

They fishtailed as she slammed on the brakes and skidded onto the shoulder. Sheldon was out of the truck before she could fumble out of her seatbelt. She left the engine running and jumped out, making sure her makeshift holster was secure. "What the fuck, Sheldon?"

He'd come around the front and was waiting for her at the driver's side door. He grabbed her by the elbow, his hand gripping the same place as when he'd marched her out of her apartment. She shrugged him off and he caught her shoulder instead and spun her to face away from the setting sun.

In the distance, cresting the snow-covered mountains, a pillar of black smoke blotted out the darkening skies. It was so massive that Penny didn't even recognize it as smoke for a minute. She thought it was a thundercloud — maybe even part of the mountains — until she realized that it was moving, like the peaks themselves were flying up into the sky.

Shaking off his hand, she stepped forward. As if moving a few feet closer would help her to make sense of what she was seeing.

"What is that?" she asked. "That's not... That's not _Vegas_, is it?"

Sheldon was already moving back to the truck and pulling open one of the doors. Less than a minute later, he came back with the clunky pair of homemade binoculars he'd packed.

"Hey, at least they had _Star Trek_ here," she joked. Her voice shook a little and she bit down on her lower lip as he lifted the binoculars and started clicking through the setttings.

"These are stormtrooper binoculars from _Star Wars_," he corrected. "I haven't seen anything to indicate that _Star Trek_ has had any appreciable impact on this world. Even the cellphones are too bulky to have been influenced." Apparently satisfied with the magnification, he turned in a precise circle on the dusty pavement and scanned the horizon in all directions.

While she waited, she did some small stretches to loosen up her legs. She'd forgotten how tiring it was to spend an entire day behind the wheel. "Please tell me that's a forest fire."

"I don't think there's enough vegetation to cause that much smoke." He dropped the binoculars to his side. "And Las Vegas sits in that direction on the other side of the mountains. I think we should swing farther to the south to avoid the city."

"No way!" Penny got right in his face. "We have to find out what's going on here, Sheldon! If we keep running with no idea of what we're dealing with, we're never going to make it to Michigan. We have to at least see if there's anything left. What if there's somebody there who can help us?"

He bounced the binoculars off his leg for few seconds, rubbing the side of his face with his free hand before apparently making up his mind. He nodded. "We'll go as far as the southern edge of the city. We need to stock up on fuel anyway and we're more likely to find it there."

"Yes, thank you!" Penny gave in to the impulse to hop up on her toes and throw her arms around him in a quick hug.

Sheldon's free hand came up to press briefly between her shoulder blades before she let him go and stepped away again.

"You'll agree to abort if I say so?" He squinted at her, bringing the binoculars up to shade his eyes. "If it looks as bad as I think it is, you'll turn around?"

Penny popped a salute and grinned. "Whatever you say, Captain."

He sucked in a breath, straightening the lines of his body until his customary stoop was erased.

"I do like the sound of that," he mused as he followed her back to the truck.

Penny barely heard him. She was already having visions of a clean, soft bed in a roadside motel. Any roadside motel. She wasn't picky, not on this trip. Maybe there would even be enough running water to wash off the sweat and dirt from their day on the road.

Surely it wouldn't be that bad. It couldn't be. Everything looked bigger in the desert, she was sure she'd heard that somewhere.

They drove around the southern edge of the mountains and turned northwards again on the outskirts of Enterprise. On any other trip, she was pretty sure that Sheldon would have made them stop on the side of the road to take a picture of the welcome sign on the edge of town. Today, though, he just sat in the passenger seat, his fingers wrapped around his knees. The column of smoke they'd seen from Pahrump loomed larger the closer they got to the city, until it blotted out the sky. The setting sun behind them picked out the burning buildings in the distance in golds and oranges as garish as the flames themselves.

They pulled into a Chevron station at the corner of Dean Martin Drive where it crossed the state route a few miles from downtown. By some miracle, the power was still on. Penny stood guard while Sheldon went inside to authorize the pumps. When he came back, he looked pale and shaky but didn't say anything.

Penny filled the tank with her gun in one hand. The skin on the back of her neck crawled. On the other side of the truck, Sheldon kept watch on the roads, a double-barreled shotgun cradled in his arms like he'd never gone a day in his life without it.

When the automatic cutoff engaged, Penny switched to filling up the portable fuel cans they'd scavenged. There was no telling how much longer the power would last, and she didn't want to be forced to switch vehicles whenever their fuel got low, so the plan was to stockpile as much as they could along the way. It made her nervous to be carrying around so much fuel — whatever it was, it wasn't gasoline — but there was no way she was going to get stranded in the middle of nowhere. Her only priority was to get Sheldon to Michigan so he could do his genius thing and get them home.

When she was done filling the cans, Sheldon helped her lift them all back into the truck. He kept his shotgun within easy reach the whole time, lying on the back bumper.

"So are you a good shot?"

"Of course I am."

She waited for him to collect his weapon then slammed the door down. "Bet I'm better."

"You're not." Without another word, he climbed into the front seat.

Penny rolled her head back and looked up at the dark smoke drifting high overhead. "I just had to get stranded here with him, huh? It couldn't be Jake Gyllenhaal?"

Neither of them spoke again until they were within sight of the airport. For the first time since they'd left Los Angeles, the streets were clogged with cars again. She had to detour down one side street after another. The air was choked with smoke, big dark flakes of ash and soot floating on the wind. Penny turned the vents to circulate the air already in the truck to try to keep some of the too-sweet odor out of the car. With the wipers going full-blast to keep the windshield clear, the soot smeared and streaked across the glass.

"What the hell is this crap?" She flipped on the wiper fluid to try to get rid of some of the greasy haze.

In the passenger seat, Sheldon sat hunched forward. The atlas was open on his lap to the Greater Las Vegas page, but his hands just lay on top of the paper like two dead birds.

She drove around a conversion van stopped across almost three full lanes of traffic and peered through the dirty windshield to look for the turn for the airport access road. "I can't see shit. Is it clearer on your side? Seriously, what the hell _is_ this? What did they build those casinos out of?"

"I don't think it's from the buildings," Sheldon said.

His voice sounded flat and dead, and it startled her so much she jammed on the brakes. Hysterical Sheldon she could handle. Blowing everything out of proportion, no problem. But defeated, lifeless, dead-sounding Sheldon threw shivers up and down her spine and an icy pressure into her stomach. "Sheldon?"

Instead of acknowledging the hand she'd laid on his arm, he closed his eyes and said in the same lifeless voice, "Let's see if we can find anything salvageable at the airport."

She shook his arm as her stomach lurched. "No, tell me what's going on! Did you see something back at the gas station?"

"It's not just buildings that are burning, Penny. I think..." He gagged and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I think it's people."


	2. Chapter 2

Penny hardly stepped off the gas until they hit the the gates of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Darkness was falling rapidly and in the glare of the headlights, they saw that all four lanes were blocked with more abandoned cars. She drove off the left side of the road, bumping down the small incline and across the scrubby growth. As soon it was clear, she charged back up onto the pavement and skidded to a stop in the middle of the road and killed the engine. Her hands shook as she tried to disengage her seatbelt, her breath coming in choking gasps. When the buckle refused to open, she keened in the back of her throat and clawed at the plastic and metal clasp.

Sheldon batted her hands away and undid the belt with his own none-too-steady hands. Penny didn't bother to thank him, just threw her door open and stumbled out of the car. She made it only a few feet and then fell to her knees, cradling her head in her hands.

He reached over and killed the lights, then pulled the keys out of the ignition so the warning bells would stop chiming. Dropping them on her seat, he picked up his shotgun and got out.

On the other side of the truck Penny gagged like she was trying to expel her entire digestive system. He wanted to go to her but there wasn't anything he could say to comfort her. Even if he'd had any proficiency in that department, there were no words that would magically fix everything or wipe away any of the terror. Everything wasn't okay. There was nothing he could do to make it okay except try to get to Traverse City before the horrors of this world caught up to them.

The desert was every bit as quiet as it had been in Pasadena, and in Las Vegas, and at every stop in between. He kept straining to hear something, anything, even the rattle of an animal moving around in the underbrush off to the sides of the road. But no matter where they were, it seemed that they were the only two living things left in the world. They hadn't even encountered a single insect on the road, as the now-clean windshield showed.

There was still that niggling feeling between his shoulder blades, though. Like something was watching. He'd first felt it on the overpass in Pasadena, when Penny turned to him like he had all the answers. Off and on since then, it had crawled up his spine then disappeared for hours. He wasn't sure he'd felt it at all once they crossed into Nevada, but it had come back with a vengeance as soon as he'd stepped into the convenience store and seen the newspapers on the rack—

"Penny," he called, suddenly desperate for a distraction. Anything to keep this thoughts from circling back around to— "Penny, would you like something to drink?"

She spat something out on the ground. "What?" It came out as more of a thick and teary laugh than a word, like she couldn't decide which direction to take and chose to follow them all at once.

"I'm not certain of the correct approach in this situation."

She laughed again, a thin watery sound this time, then sniffled through a nose full of mucus. With the truck still between them and the darkness adding another layer of camofluage, Sheldon didn't bother to contain his recoil. Why the woman didn't simply carry a handkerchief for occasions like this one, he would never understand.

"No, I don't want anything to drink or eat." There was a noise like she was dragging her feet across the pavement, then the truck shifted slightly. "Can you come over here?" she called, her voice smaller and weaker than it had been a moment earlier.

He hoped she wasn't about to start crying again. The tears that had streamed down her face the whole time she drove them away from the city had been bad enough. He'd almost reached out to her a dozen or more times, only to hold his hand back. He wasn't certain he could touch her without letting everything come tumbling out. With one last look around the area, he dropped the nose of the shotgun to point at the ground and settled his trigger finger on the stock. On top of everything else, the last thing either of them needed was a misunderstanding about where he had his weapon pointed.

"I'm walking around the rear of the vehicle," he told her, taking care to keep his footsteps slow and measured so she wouldn't be startled. After the stories she'd shared about her upbringing he doubted she would be careless with her weapon either but given her emotional state he thought prudence was more than necessary.

"Jesus, Sheldon," she groaned. "Just get over here."

He could hear the eyeroll in her voice and he would gladly take whatever pedestrian insults she wanted to level at him as long as she could keep going. He knew he wouldn't make it far on his own, but her resilience and resourcefulness to this point had come as a surprise. She was still as stubborn and annoying as she'd always been, of course. But the way she kept moving — kept _him_ moving — after each revelation knocked her back... He wouldn't have guessed it, but it was exactly what they needed.

She was sitting sideways on the driver's seat, feet dangling above the pavement. The light in the door cast a weak glow over her jeans, and faded before it reached her face. What little illumination there was from the sliver of moon visible through the smoke gave her a chalky pallor, though the crying and nausea had probably contributed to that as well.

Sheldon put himself between her and the road, blocking most of the open door with his body. He was in position before he even stopped to think about what he was doing, but he didn't move away. That niggling pressure on his back came again, much less invasive than before. It faded quickly and he let himself relax ever so slightly.

"You want some?" Penny held out her water bottle, giving him a puzzled look when he took it instead of complaining about hygiene.

"I can still taste—" he started, stopping when she held up a hand. In the weak light he could see her jaw tighten.

"Here's what I think we should do," she said. She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes. "I'm going to grab a map from the gate here, and then we're going to find somewhere to spend the night. We'll just pull off the road and take turns sleeping in the truck. Cool?"

"As crystal."

She pursed her lips for a second like she was trying to hold back a laugh. "It's, um. Okay. Good."

He was sure he'd gotten the phrase wrong but she just kept looking at him instead of correcting it.

"Can you move, maybe? So I can go get the map?"

"Oh!" he jerked away from the truck. "Yes, of course. I'll cover you."

She bobbed her head forward, letting her hair fall in her face as she jumped down to the ground. Her voice was tight again when she thanked him but her hand was warm against his arm as she passed.

There wasn't much in the way of ground cover along the road. Penny passed up several turnouts and headed down a dirt track that led toward the lake. There was a loop around what might have been an intentional grouping of scraggly bushes and she pulled to the side farthest from the road. The engine ticked as it cooled down.

They sat in the dark for a while, until Penny broke the silence. He startled when she spoke but it was the subject that took him by surprise, not the sound.

"What did your dad do?"

"What?" The wind had shifted again, sending heavier bands of clouds skating across the moon, so he could only see her as a dim silhouette against the open window. "Why do you want to know?"

There was a soft clicking noise, like she was running her nails along the heavy leather stitches in the steering wheel cover.

"I don't know. I mean, you're awfully comfortable with that gun. Guess I just wondered all of a sudden."

Sheldon cleared his throat. He hadn't talked about his father much since the man had died. There were just the occasional conversations with Missy or Mom about the estate, or listening to Meemaw tell stories he barely recognized as his own childhood. Even Leonard didn't know more than his name.

"He worked for the railroad. A brakeman. But he didn't have a regular route. He subbed for crews all over the state so he was gone a lot. And when he wasn't working, he was drinking, hunting, or watching TV."

Penny's "oh" was little more than a puff of breath. If he hadn't stopped talking, he might have missed it. He went back to looking out the window, watching to make sure nothing was sneaking up on them.

"So, uh," Penny said, her voice softer than he was used to hearing it. Like he'd inadvertently given something away. "I guess you went hunting with him sometimes?"

"Sometimes." He wondered if she would keep at it all night, pulling the stories from him in pieces until she had enough of them to put them back together again.

She didn't say ask another question, so Sheldon offered something instead. "We didn't get along. But he was in the Army once, and I was fascinated by weaponry — mostly so I could break it apart to see how it worked. I learned how to let him teach me things. It kept him from remembering that I wasn't like him."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand lift off the steering wheel. It hovered in the air between them for a few seconds, then she let it drop to her lap.

"Do you want me to take the first watch?" He was tired, exhausted all the way to the ache of his bones, and he couldn't imagine that she felt much better. But she had driven them all the way from Pasadena, so he felt compelled to make the offer.

He couldn't see her shudder and hunch her shoulders but he felt it in the faint vibration of the truck.

"I don't think I'm going to sleep for a really long time," she said. "You go ahead."

Sheldon didn't bother to ask if she were sure. If she didn't want to take the first watch, she wouldn't have offered. He hit the lever to recline his seat and turned on his side to face the door. He was so drained that he was almost asleep as soon as his eyes closed, but before he slipped totally under he could have sworn Penny reached out to smooth her hand over his hair.

"Sheldon," she whispered, "do you think there's anyone left?"

He didn't think he could lie to her, not in the dark, so he didn't say anything at all.

His dreams were confusing, images tumbling into each other with little or no context — nothing like his usual careful narratives. He remembered long grey corridors and featureless captors, the weight of restraints at his ankles. Penny was there, in a truck like the model his father had driven for decades. He leaned against the hood, a wrinkled map spread out over the hot sheet metal. The paper crinkled under his fingers until she tugged at his sleeve and led him away into a cool cavern that wound deep underground.

In one chamber, his feet suddenly lifted off the ground and he somersaulted through the air. Bounced gently off the granite ceiling where Penny was pinned in place, her hair floating around her face, her expression blank and mouth slackened by death. He pushed off the ground with his feet, shooting up through the air to pull her arms and legs away from the rock. They plummeted down, down, an immense black tunnel opening further beneath his feet as they fell.

When he woke, it felt as though he was still falling, until his eyes focused and he realized it was the truck that was moving. He shook off the disorientation and sat up to get a better look at the passing landscape. It was starting to get brighter out, everything bathed in the soft blue-grey light that heralded the sunrise just beginning on Penny's side of the road.

On Penny's side, not directly ahead.

He yanked on the lever to snap his seat back into its upright position. "Where are we?" he asked. "Why are we headed south? How long was I asleep?"

"An hour north of Phoenix; I made a detour; and, I don't know, hours." Her face was pale, dark smudges under her eyes. "Anything else you want to know?"

Sheldon shook his head, trying to dispel the last foggy remnants of his dream. "Why are we going to Phoenix? We need to go north. We need to get to Michigan."

Penny tightened her hands on the steering wheel. "We're going to Texas."

He adjusted his seatbelt and tried to lean forward far enough to put himself in her near-peripheral vision. He knew better than to try to take the wheel. "There's nothing in Texas, Penny."

"You don't know that," she cried, turning to look at him at last. "You don't know everything! What if it's just something happening here? What if your family survived whatever's going on? What if your dad's still alive here? Don't you want to find out?"

"But they're not my family," he tried to explain. "This isn't our world. And our best chance of getting home is in Michigan."

A flush was rising through her cheeks, making her pallor look slightly more vibrant. Her eyes glittered with tears. "What the fuck is this place? Where are we? Are you even going to be able to get us home? You're not, are you? This is all a waste of time! It's just a goddamn waste of time!"

She sucked in a ragged breath and faced forward again, settling her hands in the proper positions on the wheel. A few deep, even breaths and then she said, in a more casual tone that did nothing to hide the anger in her voice, "We're going to Texas. We're going to Galveston, and then we're going to Omaha, and—"

"And we're going to see them burning, too!" he shouted. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it might burst right out of his chest and damn everything he knew about anatomical possibilities. Adrenaline zinged through him, setting his nerves to vibrating. He wanted to jump from the truck, to get away and hide like he did when his parents had fought — when Penny and Leonard fought — but something hateful curled low in the back of his head. He wanted to lash out at her, to pound the words right into her brain if that's what it took.

Instead he counted backward from ten, then forward in primes to 101, then down from twenty in binary until his heartbeat slowed. It wouldn't be long before the post-adrenaline crash hit but it was a small price to pay if he could get through to her. If he could get her to turn around before it was too late.

"There's no one left," he said. "We're all there is, Penny."

She jerked her head away like he'd hit her. "Bullshit," she snarled. She slammed on the brakes and threw the gearshift into park. Leaning over the console into his side of the truck, she said it again, her mouth just inches away from his. "_Bullshit_."

Before he could try again to get through to her, Penny jumped out of the truck. When he started to follow, she held up a hand to stop him.

"Don't," she said. Her voice was raw like she was trying to hold back a scream. "Just— Just don't."

He held up his hands and sat back, and she stalked away.

She'd stopped the car next to a sign advertising an RV park and campground just a few dozen feet off the road. A sad plaster pony slumped over the top of the sign, his flaking tail sweeping over the metal pipe fashioned into someone's idea of a fancy arrow pointing down the driveway.

For the first couple of minutes, she waited for Sheldon to follow her, certain that she'd hear his footsteps any second. She almost hoped he would. She wanted to howl at him. She wanted to bury her fist in his face and break once and for all whatever it was that let him act like she was the crazy one.

By the time she reached the end of the driveway, she wanted him to come after her so she could apologize.

She _was_ the crazy one. She hadn't slept in more than twenty-four hours, and most of those had been spent driving. The sun was still too bright and her head ached constantly. She'd left her sunglasses in the truck and the light bouncing off the metal trailers parked around the campground was throwing spots in her vision faster than she could blink them away.

And every time she breathed in, she could still smell that sweet, sickly smoke that drifted over Las Vegas. Penny shook her head, trying to knock the memory loose again. It felt like it was stuck right at the front of her brain.

The door of the nearest trailer was hanging wide open, like all the cars they'd seen along the way. There wasn't much of a breeze but it swayed in what little wind moved past.

Penny rubbed her eyes. They were dry and gritty, burning from lack of sleep and the dust that coated everything from the road to the truck to her hair and teeth. She kept thinking she was seeing things sneaking past, just out of sight. Slinking down the sides of the road and melting back into the desert when she looked harder.

She turned and looked back toward the road. The truck was right where she left it — Sheldon, too. When their eyes met, he gave her a small nod and turned away, like he was giving her some privacy.

It didn't take much longer for her rage to burn itself out after that. He was right. Of course he was right. It was beyond stupid to go looking for their families. Everything she'd seen since he burst into her apartment told her it was useless. She had to put all her trust in his ability to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong, even if she wasn't completely sure he could.

Especially if he wasn't sure that he could. It was nothing concrete, nothing she could put her finger on, but Penny got the feeling he hadn't been honest with her back in Pasadena. She'd never be a match for him when it came to brains but something about his explanation just sounded _off_, like a line-reading gone wrong. It just didn't make sense no matter how she looked at it: how could an experiment gone wrong halfway around the world rip them out of their own reality and fling them into another?

"Right, like I'm going to figure it out?" she scoffed. Something skated by on the edge of her vision but when she turned to look it was just a branch waving. A chill raced up her spine and she hurried back up the driveway the way she'd come.

Sheldon had the back end opened up when she returned. He was perched above the license plate, legs braced on the road on either side of the trailer hitch with that ever-present shotgun in his hands.

"Hello," he said, like she'd just walked in for movie night.

Penny smiled back, a little easier now that she'd calmed down. She still wanted to wrap her hands around his throat, but that was nothing new. She'd been wanting to do that since at least the first week she met him.

Okay, maybe the second.

She sat next to him on the bumper and stared down the road. "What are we looking at?"

"I'm just calculating how long it would take us to backtrack or whether we should cut across the state and try the freeways. They might be less crowded now that we're out of California."

Penny kicked at some loose gravel under her feet and leaned her head against the side of the door. It was early enough that the heat hadn't started to rise and a cool breeze snuck up the legs of her jeans. She kicked off her shoes and wiggled her toes, leaned back against the totes and coolers stacked in neat towers.

She nudged Sheldon with her elbow and yawned. "Wake me up when you're ready to go, yeah?"

"Yeah."

She wanted to ask if he was just repeating the last thing she said or if he was actually listening to her, but another yawn stole the words out of her mouth. She elbowed him again, hoping that somehow he wouldd interpret it the right way, and fell into a restless sleep.

The national power grid was well on its way to the final cascade that would kill electricity to the entire country, if it wasn't already there, Sheldon said as they crossed from Colorado into Kansas late the next day. He had it mapped out in one of the notebooks packed in his emergency duffel: when the eastern seaboard would crash, how many stations had to go dark before they set off catastrophic failures across the rest of the country, how long the power might stay on if they'd had had time to prepare.

They'd lucked into a couple of hotspots along their route: small towns with wind power or natural gas that appeared to have been isolated from the main grid, either by accident or design. But even they would fail eventually; with no one to perform regular maintenance and safetey checks, the generators would shut themselves down or burn themselves out.

"Do you think that's what happened in Los Angeles?" She wanted to ask about Vegas too but the smell was still in her nose every time she inhaled.

"No," was all he said.

Penny let it drop while Sheldon busied himself with changing CDs out of the in-dash player. Sometime after Phoenix he had decided that his duties as navigator extended to making sure the music kept going at all times, and never mind that neither of them turned the volume up past two or three. At best, the noise was a reminder of all they'd left behind — an unspoken agreement between them to keep the silence of this world at bay.

They stopped at a ramshackle filling station somewhere between Dodge City and Salina and had to siphon fuel out of the underground tanks. Once they'd stocked up and refilled their water from the bottles in the nearby grocery store, Sheldon got flustered by the divided highway outside the parking lot and sent them in the wrong direction. Twenty minutes later they were completely lost in the middle of an industrial park, too busy arguing about which road would take them back to their marked route to pay attention to what they were driving past. It wasn't until Penny pulled into a driveway to turn around that either of them saw the treasure trove they'd stumbled onto: a Schwan's warehouse, with a generator still humming along merrily on one side of the building and a brightly lit swan flying over the door.

She hotwired one of the delivery trucks in the parking lot — if she ever saw her brother again without security glass between them, she was giving him the world's biggest thank-you hug for dragging her along on one too many bad ideas.

It took a few tries to ram it through one of the overhead doors. Once she got the truck clear, she and Sheldon took turns keeping watch outside while the other stacked frozen steaks and vegetables in airtight coolers and heaved them into their own vehicle.

Sheldon protested when she dumped most of his computer equipment onto the warehouse floor to make room for the new food, but it was halfhearted at best. He plucked a flash drive out of a zippered pocket and let her go back to loading. When she suggested he start the truck and wait while she searched the offices, he just took the keys and climbed inside. Less than five minutes later, she was racing back down to the warehouse floor with a map of every distribution center in the midwest.

She waved it in his face. "Not bad, huh?"

His crooked grin was all the answer Penny needed. She wasn't ready to give up on miracles just yet.

She convinced Sheldon to take the wheel somewhere around Atchison. He didn't do too bad, once she reminded him that there was no one left to check the traffic cameras and the only way a car could surprise him was if he closed his eyes.

Penny fell in and out of a doze while he drove. She hadn't slept well on the road, starting with the catnap she had caught back in Arizona. Her dreams were full of creeping things, rattling noises just out of sight. She kept feeling flames lick at the bottoms of her feet, curling up her arms and legs, and dancing away down the road. A dozen times — maybe more — she woke with a scream just barely held in check as she smelled her hair start to burn.

He finally cried uncle near Monroe City, rolling to a painfully slow stop and peeling his fingers from the steering wheel one by one. She directed him down side streets at random until they found an elementary school with a parking lot hidden from the street. They still hadn't seen another living thing in all the time they'd been driving but thick plumes of smoke had risen in the distance above every city they skirted.

Neither of them went more than a foot from the truck without a gun.

They threw rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock for the first watch; Penny pretended to be surprised when he won two out of three, then settled into the driver's seat with the atlas to see how much further they had to go. It felt like they'd been driving forever, like each day had stretched out to a lifetime. On the map, the distance between where they were and where they were going was barely as wide as her hand. She pulled a pen out of the glove box and scribbled on the edges of the map: 600 miles, give or take. Another ten hours and they'd be there.

Whatever _there_ was.

She angled the rearview mirror down to look at Sheldon, curled up like a puppy in the backseat. Sometimes it was hard to remember that inside that head was a brain that would put everybody else to shame, with the way he dressed and acted like a hyperactive toddler most of the time.

When he first burst into her apartment, babbling about catastrophes and disasters and squirrel meat or whatever, she had only gone along with him the way she always had: to get him out of her hair so she could get back to the things that really mattered, like work and bills and shoes. But he'd surprised her: by shifting shifted gears from panicked to capable in less time than it normally took him to order dinner, and holding himself together while she fell apart, not just in Vegas but in Arizona too.

He made a noise like a whimper in his sleep. Penny tucked the atlas under the visor and crawled over the console to sit in the passenger seat so she could keep an eye on him. It seemed like his dreams were as bad as hers, making him thrash around on the narrow bench seat, mumbling broken phrases that made no sense to her.

The wind picked up outside, whistling around the building to whip through the parking lot. Dried leaves scraped across the pavement, like nails on a chalkboard. She fought against the shiver that walked up her spine and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt. It blocked out everything but her view of Sheldon in the backseat, but the creeping sensation of being watched only intensified.

A ferocious blast of wind buffeted the truck and went screaming out into the open prairie behind the school. Penny gripped the gun in her pocket, putting her thumb on the safety and cursing herself for a fool the whole time. What was she going to do? If it wanted to rip off the doors and suck her out, it wasn't like a handgun was going to stop it.

Something banged into the top of the truck and Penny gave a choked-off shriek, clapping her empty hand over her mouth to keep from waking Sheldon. She turned to look out the windshield and saw a tree branch tumbling into the distance.

"For God's sake, Penny, get a grip," she chided herself.

In the back seat, Sheldon stirred and muttered but settled back down after a few seconds without waking. Penny released a shaky breath and took her hand off the gun in her pocket, wiping her sweaty palm on the leg of her pants.

She didn't know how much longer she sat there, watching his face as he slept and doing her best to block out the howling of the wind.

Penny smelled the smoke long before they saw it. It started creeping in through the open windows an hour north of Peoria. She turned on the air conditioning and set the vents to circulate again. Even after that, the smell got thicker the closer they got to Chicago. The farmland rolled away to the horizon, where a black haze hung like an eternally approaching thunderstorm.

Sheldon told her to turn south again just before Joliet, the first words he'd spoken since they crossed into Illinois. They wound their way across the state, detouring around smaller and smaller towns, each of them throwing pillars of dense, choking smoke into the sky. A cheery sign welcomed them to the Hoosier state and directed them to Cedar Lake, but by the time they reached it all the trees were ablaze.

The smoke started to lift the farther into Indiana they traveled. Penny started angling north, taking the back roads around Valparaiso and La Porte. She had to backtrack almost twenty miles somewhere to the west of South Bend when the road suddenly dead-ended into a solid mass of abandoned cars. The whole time, she kept up a steady stream of chatter: telling Sheldon about the girls at work, the last auditions she'd gone on, what she was going to buy first when they got home.

At first he'd nodded or grimaced in her direction as she talked, throwing in the occasional barbed comment but without any of the usual heat. By the time they crossed the interstate just south of the Michigan state line, he'd completely withdrawn into himself again. It was like Pasadena all over again as she drove across the overpass. She tried not to turn her head, to keep her eyes trained straight ahead, but the same sneaking shadows were shifting just outside the range of her vision. She couldn't help but look.

Cars stretched out as far as she could see in each direction, across all four lanes of traffic, on the shoulder, in the median strip in both directions. It was like no one knew where to go so they just went everywhere, all at once. Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people — all of them getting into their cars to escape and disappearing into nothing instead.

Penny pulled into the first filling station she saw after that. Sheldon nodded dumbly when she asked him to fill the tank and the now empty cans while she ran to the restroom, but by the time she crossed the tiny lot and pushed open the door, he still hadn't moved. She made it all the way into the dingy stall at the back of the store before she broke down, too tired to pretend anymore. Her hands and arms ached from gripping the steering wheel. Tension snaked across her shoulders and up into her neck, pulling muscles and tendons tight and painful with every shuddering sob.

She wiped her face with scratchy brown paper towels and turned on the sink faucet, hardly expecting anything to come out but nearly bursting into tears again when that was exactly what happened. She went back out into the store and pulled a bottle of water out of one of the warm beverage coolers. She upended it over her head, right there next to the hot dog carousel. It had been ages since she'd seen running water, even longer since she was able to bathe, and the water felt like heaven slipping down her skin and dripping on the floor.

Through the window behind the counter, she saw that Sheldon had finally dragged himself out of the truck. He stood at the pump, staring off into the distance toward the north where a dark haze drifted along the horizon. It was too far away to tell what it was, not yet; Penny let herself believe for a few minutes that it was just a summer storm rolling in from the lake.

Sheldon was waiting in the passenger seat again when she came tripping out of the store with bags filled with more jerky and dried fruit and popped corn. He didn't say anything about her red-rimmed eyes, and she returned the favor.

A few hours later — as they neared the end of yet another road through a national forest — the sun started to slip down below the trees. Penny flipped down the visor and pushed it over her window, ignoring the black shadows that raced alongside the truck. Sheldon tapped his fingers against his knees in a rhythm that didn't match anything Penny could hear — not the drum of the tires on the pockmarked country road or the thump of her heartbeat, nor the barely audible music that still spilled from the speakers.

He hadn't said more than a dozen words all day, but Sheldon kept switching out the CDs like the world would end if he didn't.

As soon as the thought formed in her mind, Penny had to bite down on her lip — hard enough to draw blood — to keep from dissolving into hysterical giggles. Maybe she should tell him to stop. Maybe it would be a kindness to stop fighting. She felt the lick of flames on the backs of her legs. The heavy, dry, greasy feel of ash on her tongue and down the back of her throat. Maybe she should just stop the car and let the shadows take over, let them lift her up into the sky to float among the clouds and the smoke and the cinders that rained down on the cities.

She was easing her foot off the accelerator without even noticing, until Sheldon jerked his head back and made a startled noise. He reached out and put his hand over hers on the steering wheel, twisting in his seat to look behind them.

"Drive," he hissed. "Penny, _drive_."

She took her eyes off the road to look in the mirror and felt her headache clear, just for a moment. Just long enough to see the shadows recede back into the shape of buildings and telephone poles as they cleared the trees. Sheldon squeezed her hand tighter and tried to smile, one side of his mouth curling up into a rounded cheek. He kept his hand over hers until she had to pull away to turn, away from the _Welcome to Traverse City!_ sign beckoning them onward.

The agriculture station that served as the decoy for the research facility wasn't marked on any of their maps, but Sheldon still remembered the turns the driver had taken after picking him up at the Amtrak station. The closer they got, the more Penny tried to stomp down the nervous excitement building in her stomach. The darkness they'd seen advancing from the lake had been a bank of thunderclouds after all, racing to the southeast to dump rain along the I-75 corridor.

They hadn't smelled smoke nor seen flames since they crossed into Michigan. For the first time in days, Penny truly let herself believe that they were going to get home.

"Turn down the next road on the left," Sheldon said, his voice high and tight with tension. "It narrows after a quarter of a mile but keep going. The entrance is in a clearing about half a mile in, but you won't see it until you're right on top of it."

The road was hardly fit for the name, just two ruts leading through the grass away from the main road and into the trees. She drove at little more than a snail's pace, wincing as branches scraped along the body of the truck and stones popped under the tires.

As promised, the road narrowed again as they went deeper in to the trees, then widened again, right on cue. Penny scanned the clearing, looking for a door or a small structure that would let them inside.

"Is this it?" she asked when nothing jumped out at her right away. Maybe it was more well-hidden than she gave the government credit for. "Sheldon, maybe we turned down the wrong—?"

"No, it was right here. I know it was here. We turned seven miles after the— And there's the tree with the— It should be right here!" He clutched his head. "Right _here_! We parked over there, under the willow, and then we walked thirteen paces to the security building that looked like a well house, and then we—"

Penny pulled his hands away from his head before he started tugging on his hair. "Sheldon, sweetie, maybe it's just a little different here! Maybe we should just get out and look around."

He jerked his hands away from hers, a horrified look splashing across his face. "Oh. _Oh_. I didn't even think that— Oh, Lord, I never even considered— I mean, I _considered_ it but I really thought it would be here. After all of this, I thought it would be here!"

"Sheldon, you're starting to freak me out. You didn't consider what?" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized what he meant. Her stomach lurched and she threw herself back, away from him, against the door of the truck.

"Oh, God. Sheldon, no. We're just in the wrong place! We'll try the next road, we'll keep going until we find it! Look—" She scrambled out of the truck, stumbling when her feet hit the ground, her legs shaky from too long in one position. "Look, it's got to be here somewhere, right? We'll just— We'll _find_ it."

Penny leaned back in the open door, reaching out to touch the side of his leg. "Come on," she pleaded. "We've come all this way; we can't give up now."

"You're right." His voice was too smooth and mild for him to be anywhere but on the verge of a meltdown. "We've come all this way. But it's getting dark. We shouldn't be outside when it's dark."

"Right," she said. "Right. Yes. We'll just— We'll find somewhere to spend the night, and everything will look better in the morning, right?"

He nodded as she clicked her seatbelt closed and started the truck again. "Of course," he agreed. "Everything always looks better in the morning."

Penny drove north on one of the narrow fingers of land that stuck out into the lake. She drove north until there was no more road, then she turned east and kept going until they couldn't go any farther. There was a cabin in the trees, right on the edge of the water, with an outdated kitchen and a lumpy bed in a loft above the living room.

She barely remembered stopping the car, let alone going inside the house or climbing upstairs to fall into bed. But here she was, thrashing her way out of musty sheets, still dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing since they left Missouri, minus her shoes and socks. On the other side of the bed, Sheldon snored at the ceiling and made disgruntled noises when Penny pulled too hard on the blankets.

The floor was freezing but she didn't want to stop. If she didn't keep moving, she'd wind up right back in the bed; she could still feel its softness trying to pull her in. She tiptoed across the room, leaving Sheldon in the tangle of blankets and pillows. She'd barely made it to the door before he rolled into the space she'd left and pulled her pillow over his head.

Every step down the stairs creaked or popped under her feet, loud enough to make her wince at each one. The tilt of the banister made her dizzy and she went down the last half of the staircase with her eyes closed. In the kitchen, she lit the angular campstove and put the old-fashioned drip coffeepot on the burner before stepping out onto the deck. A slight breeze kicked up over the lake and brought pine needles down in a shower out of the trees nearest the house. She curled up on the swing, tugging on the hem of the thick, lined flannel shirt she'd fished off the bedroom floor.

The sky over the water was still dark; tiny pinprick stars scattered like freckles across the heavens and mirrored below, with swirls of pink and orange just beginning to reach over the horizon, turning the trees at the shoreline a green-gold.

To the south, a dull orange glow smudged across the dark lines of trees far in the distance but the wind was still blowing in the right direction, keeping the smoke and fire at bay, away from the cabin.

Pushing off with one foot, she sat back and closed her eyes, lost herself in the gentle sway of the swing. She drifted off quickly, straight into the same dream she'd been having since Arizona.

They stood on the side of the road, pine trees all around them. Overhead a huge shadow blotted out the sunlight, most of the sky, a fierce wind kicking up and blowing pine needles into her face. She threw her arms up to block them but they kept flying at her, cutting her skin to stinging ribbons. Next to her Sheldon groaned, low and pain-filled. Her blood pooled at her feet, melting the asphalt when she tried to get to him. The harder she fought against it the deeper she sank until all that was left were—

Ribbons of weak yellow sunshine danced through the trees when she woke. She raised her arms over her head, feeling the ache of every mile in the muscles of her hips and thighs and lower back as she stretched. Behind her, a board creaked.

"There's no cream for the coffee," Sheldon announced as he held a mug in front of her face.

Penny tipped her head back and aimed a sleepy smile at him. She wanted the caffeine — needed it, _craved_ it — but she was more interested in making sure he was okay. "How you doin'?"

He reached down, took one of her hands, and wrapped it around the mug. She grabbed the bottom of his shirt with the other before he could retreat.

"I am fine, Penny," she said for him, an imitation of his voice that was piss-poor at best. "Thank you for asking. I am happy to hear you are concerned about me. That is very nice of you."

"I don't sound like a robot."

"No, of course not." He usually sounded more like a whiny, East Texas robot. Penny let go of him and took a sip of coffee. It was oily and bitter but she didn't think even sugar and cream would have made a difference. "Okay, maybe you do a little bit. Sometimes."

She swung her legs down off the bench as Sheldon stepped around the end of the swing and brushed imaginary dirt or leaves off the empty seat. He gingerly sat down next to her, feet firmly planted on the floor. Penny waited until the shimmying stopped then kicked sideways at his shins until he pushed off. Once he'd found a steady rhythm she curled her hands around the mug and leaned into his side, tucking her head against his shoulder. He didn't snake an arm around her waist or along the back of the bench but she felt the pressure of his jaw against the top of her head when he finally spoke.

"I'm sorry I made you come all this way for nothing."

Penny closed her eyes tight against the tears that threatened to spill over. She hadn't given up hope. She couldn't. Somewhere in that gigantic brain of his, she knew, were the answers they needed to get home. Never in a million years would she understand what it was he was looking for or what he could do when he found it. But despite all that, she was still willing to do whatever it took to get him to the right place to get it done. She'd put all her trust in him — in them — back on the Fair Oaks overpass and again in Arizona, and she hadn't truly regretted it since.

But she also knew that he was much less sure about it. For all his brains and determination, he was too willing to throw everything away at the first sign of trouble. He'd run home instead of staying to fight for his professional reputation, or finding a way to start treating his friends in ways that didn't make them homicidal; he'd retreated into looms and luminous fish instead of standing up to his boss; and he'd gone all the way to goddamn Montana rather than deal with the aftermath of the robbery like a normal person.

Luckily for him, Penny thought, she never was very good at knowing when to quit.

"It's all right," she said. She put the coffee mug down on the deck then picked up Sheldon's arm and draped it over her shoulders as she sat back. "We'll figure it out. You just tell me which way to go."

  
_And it was let's fell our withering tree  
It bloomed in the rushes and debris  
I would bury it in ice  
For all of eternity to see_

  
In a low, squat building surrounded by trees on three sides and an unassuming gravel lot on the fourth, the steady low-level buzz from the mainframe was lost amid the cheers of the research team as the wireframe model stabilized for a moment then disappeared. The data feeds kept scrolling for a moment, tapering off until they too had vanished from the screen.

After one last look at the monitors to make sure everything was in order, Dr Hamid Dariush closed the subjects' files and saved them to the archived directory. He snapped shut the lid of his laptop and clapped his hands.

"Great work, everyone!" he called in Italian, the way the team preferred. "Let's reset and go again in twenty minutes. We still have a lot of test cases to get through today."

  
_How's forever been baby?_


End file.
